Tuesday, July 05, 2005

The new black

So what's the coolest thing going around? Podcasting, apparently.

The day after I unveil my first podcast The Australian's (newspaper) italive pullout has a double-page spread on the subject. The article isn't that great; its reason for being written is simply the release of the new version of iTunes that supports podcasting. I guess it doesn't tell me anything new because I've been madly reading how-to-podcast articles wherever I could find them as I tried to get that first one up and going.

In my podcast I mentioned radio stations going digital. Or more precisely, moving away from cassette tapes to digital recording. In last Thursday's (June 30, 2005) Media section of The Australian they also had what they called a 'special industry focus' on radio. One of the stories, "Industry overdue for digital dawn", spoke of radio's need and desire to switch to digital technology while being held back by slow decisions on government policy concerning the matter.

On the same page as that article was one about the success of podcasting of several Radio National programs that you can subscribe to through ABC Online. I was excited by the article's claim that the Media Report was one of those being podcast, and rushed off to subscribe. It is in fact not offered, which seems a little strange given this whole podcasting business can be described as a new form of media. Ah ha. I have just re-read the first two pars in the story.

Radio National's podcasting experiment has been so successful that another raft of specialist programs will be made available online from July 9.The popular 8.30 Reports - ...Media Report... will be added to the list of MP3-downloadable content.

Seems I got a little too excited in my haste there, and will have to wait another four days. But the trend quoted in that story - 19,000 Radio National program downloads on June 19 to 74,000 last week - can also be seen in Feedburner statistics.

Feedburner is a free service that manages syndicated feeds, over 60,000 of them, of which mine is one. An RSS feed basically allows you to read new website content (such as these blog posts) without actually visiting the site. Now, with podcasting, those feeds also allow you to listen to the posts, without having to manually download them. Their numbers show they've managed an increasing number of podcasts through their service, from 500 in November last year to almost 6,000 this May. With the media coverage podcasting currently receives (mainly thanks to iTunes) that number will inevitably climb even faster as we all jump on the bandwagon.

Now as far as my podcasting goes, I need to find a way to make it more 'professional'. A jingle to start with. Some interviews perhaps. I read about doing online interviews, and a way to record iChat audio directly into GarageBand. The problem is, I don't use iChat. I have just downloaded Skype, however, and will have to look into whether I can record audio through that. Perhaps an online interview with you could be on the cards, Mr Carlill?

Thanks for reading, and I'll keep you up to date with what's happening in podcasting at the earley edition.